Could you live without your blow dryer? What about your flat iron?

When I was in my 20s and living in Washington, D.C., I lived in a townhouse with two other women. One of them, Jennifer*, had a head of fluffy, sunshine-yellow Cocker Spaniel hair that reached her shoulders. It was her pride and, um, pride.

While my other roommate Zoe* and I were snuggled for an extra 90 minutes in our beds or downstairs savoring our Corn Flakes and the morning Post, it was go-time for Jennifer. Power tools roared, a blow dryer and -- was that a blow torch?

Occasionally her bedroom door was cracked, and we would spy her sitting cross-legged and frozen in front of her full-length mirror, as though praying to a deity. She had some other instrument in her hand. It had a long squiggly cord and some gleaming hardware. Exotic chemicals seeped into the stairwell.

It paid off. 

Jennifer would come back from Safeway with a breathless story about a guy who had told her she was “beautiful.” Then there was the encounter at Home Depot. The dude from the metro station. The Harvard-educated guy and others who got to rip their own hair out every weekend as one her 11 “best guy friends.”

I thought of Jennifer the other day when I was speaking with a state senator in the South Carolina Capitol. He was worried about South Carolina’s sluggish attitude toward clean energy.

The lawmaker, Paul Campbell, a Republican, said he didn’t want South Carolina to end up like California in the early 2000s. Rolling blackouts. Disrupted lives and businesses. The cautionary tale of a decade and beyond.

So Campbell plans to introduce legislation for a clean-energy plan to meet the state’s rising energy needs.

“Thirty-eight other states now have either a renewable or clean standard. I don’t want to be the last one left out,” he said.

“I don’t want ‘38’ to be ‘49,’ and then South Carolina is the only one that doesn’t have one. We need to be in the game.”

The guy's not trying to jolt anybody’s sense of the universe. He already predicts his bill will call for a voluntary standard, not a mandatory one, and one for “clean energy,” as opposed to “renewable,” so that nuclear energy may occupy a key spot.

Most of our state’s electricity comes from its nuclear power plants. The point, said Campbell, is to at least start the discussion and get the public and legislators thinking about the state’s energy challenges.

We've been slow to catch the green momentum stirring in other states.

For one thing, South Carolina’s solar incentives are much smaller than in neighboring North Carolina and Georgia. And recycling experts contend that South Carolina is also missing opportunities to turn garbage into jobs — some 36,000 in five years, says the Southeast Recycling Development Council.

Oh, we're not alone in the region.

A map published by the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance shows that Georgia and Florida, like South Carolina, lack a renewable energy portfolio. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s 2010 scorecard ranked South Carolina 40th, Georgia 37th and Florida 30th.

California has righted itself after its infamous electricity crisis and was ranked No. 1 on the council’s scorecard for the fourth straight year.

‘The gap is widening’

Why is South Carolina stuck in neutral? Campbell said most lawmakers don't have a deep understanding of the issue. Others say the prohibitive costs would be a tough sell for such a poor state. But there’s also an antibusiness stigma attached to anything “green,” not to mention a strong whiff of “liberal.”

During a briefing on the S.C. House side Tuesday, Conservation Voters director Ann Timberlake said conservation is inherently “very conservative.” The big message of the day: Green energy policies are creating the next wave of jobs.

David Odell, of Southern Energy Management, which supplies solar power and energy efficiency services in the Carolinas, praised legislation North Carolina passed in 2007 for a renewable energy and energy-efficiency portfolio standard, which was coupled with existing energy incentives.

South of the border, it’s a different picture.

“South Carolina is lagging behind, and the gap is widening,” said Odell.

So what do you think it will take to reveal the importance of energy in our daily lives? A weeklong blackout? Or maybe a giant blowup poster of my old roommate?